Inquiry Practice
● STANDING IN INQUIRY
What is the purpose of inquiry?
In times of complex, unpredictable change, questions show you a way forward. Use the stance of inquiry to create your future out of chaos.
What is inquiry?
How to adopt the patterns of inquiry?
Succeeding in complex environments requires adaptive capacity, and adaptive capacity requires that you step into and stand in inquiry.
Engaging the world through a lens of inquiry is to engage with curiosity to be your best at work, at home, in politics, in service. Inquiry becomes a way of life. Using inquiry to build adaptive capacity is not just about asking questions. It is approaching every interaction, every situation, every opportunity with questions about what can be learned in this moment, in this situation, from this person.
Turning judgment into curiosity
Judgment allows us to discern what we like and don’t like, what is safe and what is not, which path will more likely take us to our destination. Judgment helps us avoid what is dangerous and stay safe. Other times judgments limit what we can see, shaping a landscape of decision making and action that is too narrow to support and sustain learning and adaptation. Patterns of bias and prejudice are cultural examples of judgment that focus on differences that restrict, rather than encourage, growth.
Turning disagreement into shared exploration
Patterns of disagreement emerge whenever we encounter difference. “Things are not as I believe they should be.” “Others don’t see things as I think they should.” “This should not be happening.”
Patterns that emerge from a brush with difference can range from mild cognitive dissonance to argument to conflict to all-out violence and war. In complex systems, difference is not destructive, it is the energy behind all change.
The greater the difference, the greater the energy for change, the greater the potential for larger and more impactful patterns.
Turning defensiveness into self-reflection
When the threat comes, our first reaction is to get it and all it represents as far away as possible. What might happen, if, at that moment, we stopped and reflected on why we feel as we do?
When we feel threatened, we may need to move to a place where we are safe from harm. At the same time, what feels threatening may come from our own perceptions of the situation or the people in it. The fear we feel may very well be about our own sense of safety or status or competence, for instance, and the only way to “move away” from that sense of danger is to reflect on what that fear represents to us.
When we can separate the real threat or danger from our own perceptions and personal fears, we are better able to step beyond the flight-or-fight response and engage across that difference.
Turning assumptions into questions
Our assumptions provide the foundations for how we see and understand our world. They shape our perspectives and give us a conceptual place to stand. From that space, we step into decisions, choices, and actions that shape our life.
Our assumptions are based in our experiences and in the lessons we have learned through the course of our life. Our cultural background, our family or community values, experiences of joy or pain, and our sense of self inform our assumptions about the world.
Sometimes our assumptions are built on fact and reality; sometimes our assumptions are not. They may be based on misinformation or lack of information or misinterpretation of the information we have.…